Nolan’s CF Summit workshop description

Do you maintain legacy ColdFusion applications, perhaps written with old procedural-style code? Have you been told you should be using a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework but don't really understand how that works? Does the idea of rewriting the entire application seem like an impossible task? What if you could instead revamp your code in phases, without having to do it all at once?

Come to this workshop and learn:

What the MVC design pattern is and what problems it solves

How the FW/1 and ColdBox frameworks use a convention-based approach to bring consistent structure to an application

What Dependency Injection (DI) is, how it simplifies the “model” portion of applications, and how they are used in FW/1 and ColdBox

How to refactor real-world procedural code into MVC-style code

Hands-on portion of the workshop will:

Analyze and deconstruct a simple procedural application to see what code belongs in the model, the view, and how the controller ties the two together.

Move the code into the appropriate MVC layers and test it.

Discuss strategies for migrating large applications in phases.

Use CommandBox and Git to spin up on-demand instances of ColdFusion and manage our code.

This workshop will help anyone with a moderate skill level in ColdFusion, and at least some familiarity with object-oriented programming concepts. It will be a Bring-Your-Own-Laptop session. Prior to the CF Summit we will provide links and instructions to download and install CommandBox and the sample application code.

Bio

Nolan Erck has been developing software for 19 years. Starting in the video game industry working on titles for Maxis and LucasArts, then advancing to web development in 1999, his list of credits includes Grim Fandango, StarWars Rogue Squadron, SimPark, SimSafari as well as high-traffic websites for clients. Nolan manages the SacInteractive User Group, teaches classes on aspects of software development, and regularly gives presentations at conferences and user groups across the country. He is also Chief consultant at South of Shasta

Interview transcript

Michaela: Welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with Nolan Erck from South of Shasta Consulting. And we're gonna be talking about ColdFusion Best Practices. But more importantly, when the best practices are not the best practice. So we'll look at best practices, and what they really are. What is technical debt, and why you don't want too much of it on your project. Picking two of good, cheap, and quick, and how to do that. We’ll look at a very naughty tag called C.F. form, and when they actually could be cool to use. And when it is okay to change code on your production server. We'll also look at some frameworks you may not be using, and what to do with error messages, and the best practice there. So, welcome Nolan.

Nolan: Thanks for having me.

Michaela: Hey, I'm glad to have you back on the show. And Nolan’s being very popular. He was speaking in C.F. objective. I think you are in four sessions, or something.

Nolan: Part of four sessions, yeah.

Michaela: Yeah, and he's also speaking N.C. Defcon, C.F. camp, and C.F. summit. So we'll talk more about those towards the end of the episode. But first, let's just clarify what exactly is a best practice? We hear about them all the time. What exactly is a best practice?

Nolan: So best practice is a technique, or a guideline of some kind that has generally been accepted by whatever community you're part of. In this case ColdFusion or CFML. As that's the at least currently less proper respected way to do whatever the task is you're talking about. The reason I say most current is sometimes, best practices of all over the course of the evolution of the language, or evolution of the technology stack, or whatever. So it might be a best practice today, may not have been a best practice five years ago. And it might not be a best practice five years in the future.